Documentary Positions: Wiltrud Baier & Sigrun Köhler

The inspiration came from an appeal on New Year's Eve: bread instead of firecrackers. “We want - in a figurative sense - both humor and seriousness, light and shadow for our film work: Firecrackers AND bread.” What documentary filmmaker Wiltrud Baier, who together with Sigrun Köhler forms the unique directing duo Böller und Brot, formulates anecdotally touches on a concern that is rarely found in documentary film. What is meant is the combination of the serious and the funny, of factual-analytical observation of the world and its ironic-playful refraction, of research and thirst for knowledge on the one hand and the comic experience of not being able to quench this thirst and of being part of the story being told. Their related sense of humor forms the foundation for the successful collaboration between the two documentary filmmakers.
Sigrun Köhler, born in Schwäbisch Hall in 1967, and Wiltrud Baier from Erlangen, who is the same age, met at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy in Ludwigsburg, not far from Stuttgart. It was there that they produced their first joint works, including the multi-award-winning short film How Time Flies about Köhler's hundred-year-old grandfather. While most of their fellow students left the region after graduation to seek their fortune in Berlin and elsewhere, Baier and Köhler remained in southern Germany and still find the subjects of their documentaries here today. With their company Böller und Brot, founded in 2000, they produced the local ethnological village study Schotter wie Heu (Gravel Like Hay) based in Gammesfeld, documented the clash between opponents and supporters of the German railroad project “Stuttgart 21” in Alarm am Hauptbahnhof (Alert at the Central Station) and portrayed the Texan drummer Jimmy Carl Black, a co-founder of the Mothers of Invention, in Upper Bavaria. Seven feature-length documentaries, several short films and other works, including flip-books, have been made over the past 25 years. In an original and humorous way, they combine observations of people, places and rituals with questions that touch on the major themes of life: Time, money, faith, death. (Jörg Frieß)